Boring, complex and important: a recipe for the web's dire future

Sarah Sclarsic: 'let's put live cultures back into agriculture'

This article was taken from the January 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

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Last August, the first hamburger to be grown in a lab -- rather than in a cow -- was cooked and eaten at a public event in London.

The burger was created by a research team led by scientist Mark Post from Maastricht University, and the $325,000 (£200,000) bill was footed by Google cofounder Sergey Brin. The event succeeded in catching the media's attention. However, in focusing on the novelty and controversy, most press coverage overlooked the tremendous significance of the achievement. The New York Times described it as an "odd demonstration", but it is more appropriate to place the cultured hamburger in its proper context: as the next rational step in the development of agriculture.

The process of culturing animal products start with a small sample of cells taken harmlessly from an animal. Those cells proliferate when provided with a suitable environment of nutrients, temperature and growth media. Cells can be directed to grow into muscle, skin or other tissues for use as meat, leather and various products. What we need to do now is perfect our processes: we need to invest in the research and facilities to grow cells inexpensively at commercial scale. Agriculture will become far more efficient when we can grow -- in weeks -- a piece of leather or meat in exactly the shape, taste and nutritional profile we want, instead of cutting it out of an animal. Eventually, all materials from animals -- from meat and leather to milk and ivory -- could be safely and quickly biofabricated.

Biofabrication offers a replacement for our broken system of animal farming. Billions of animals live in crowded and filthy factory farms, which requires prophylactic administration of antibiotics to keep them healthy. This leads to anti-biotic-resistant pathogens. Factory farms are thus breeding grounds for animal and human disease, for contaminated meat, and for animal abuse. If we culture meat, however, we do not need to keep billions of animals captive. Cells sourced from a relatively few animals could feed the entire world. By some estimates, one biopsy from a cow can provide enough cells to create 175 million hamburgers.

Biofabrication will allow us to meet global demand while reducing our negative environmental impact. Cultured meat requires 99 per cent less land, 98 per cent less water and about half as much energy as traditional farming. About 66 per cent of agricultural land is devoted to growing crops to feed livestock, with only eight per cent devoted to growing food for human consumption. Cultured meat and other forms of biofabrication will free up land to feed people instead of livestock. Reclaimed land could be rewilded, repairing natural ecosystems and animal habitats. Through culturing animal products, we can create a stable, sustainable food supply for a growing population, providing inexpensive protein and reducing food insecurity for billions.

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Over generations, humanity has developed methods of cultivating animals, plants and micro-organisms to produce food, clothing and other products. Yeast turns grain into bread and grapes into wine; bacteria transform milk into cheese and yoghurt; fungal spores and bacteria turn bean curd into tofu. These foods and others exist because we have invented recipes to repurpose natural processes.

Cultured organisms produce much of our medicine as well as our food. Penicillin was first purified from a fungus in 1942. Because natural supplies are unreliable, there was only enough penicillin to treat ten people that first year. Scientists invented a process to grow the fungus in fermentation vats, and by 1944 could produce enough penicillin to save millions of lives. Today, our progress towards culturing animal cells at scale follows in the footsteps of that scientific triumph.

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Current practices in factory farming are unsustainable. We should draw inspiration from our history of agricultural invention.

In vitro animal-cell culture is a practical necessity that will save billions of animal lives, improve the quality of life for billions of people, and reduce our negative impact on the environment.

Sarah Sclarsic is a technology entrepreneur. She heads business development at Modern Meadow, a biofabrication company.

This article was first published in the January 2014 issue of WIRED magazine